Dissemination of Gastroenterology and Hepatology Research on Social Media Platforms Is Associated With Increased Citation Count.

Introduction: The purpose of this study was to find out whether dissemination of gastroenterology and hepatology (GI) research on social media networks correlates with citation count at 5 years.

Methods: We correlated the Altmetric Attention Score with Web of Science citation counts at 5 years for scholarly work published in the 10 highest impact factor GI journals in 2014.

Results: In 4,026 analyzed items, the correlation (r) between Altmetric Attention Score and citations at 5 years was 0.62 (P < 0.001), representing strong correlation. Twitter was the platform with the strongest correlation with citations.

Discussion: Social media attention garnered by GI scholarly work strongly correlates with the number of citations at 5 years.